Nicholas Mosley - Hopeful Monsters

To be cunning, to be wise, humans of course have had to get out of the Garden of Eden.

Near to this house there is being built an enormous army camp: the uncluttered landscape is seen as providing a perfect training ground for soldiers. And the soldiers might be useful in protecting us scientists, I suppose, from anyone who might be jealous of our chance to destroy the world — or of giving it a chance of survival.

As a matter of fact it is now thought that our work may take several years: a particular uranium isotope has to be separated if there is to be a chain reaction. And this, as Donald has always said, will require complex engineering and much money. To find a moderator to slow the reactions down we are beginning to experiment with both graphite and heavy water: but it is difficult to make the former sufficiently pure, and almost no supplies are available for the latter. So there are still many who say that the thing can't be done: in which case who cares — so long as it can't be done by Nazis. But there are other ways of destruction; there may not be other ways for survival.

Perhaps you will have been able to see Franz? The Nazis are the

506

only people I can imagine who might be glad to blow up themselves along with everyone else: what could be more glorious than such a Gotterddmmerungl But if we learn to look at and live with the implications of such a Bomb, self-destruction might seem less glorious.

The Russians have seemed not to mind killing or being killed: but they have not made out that there is much glory in destruction and self-destruction.

Is there any news about your father?

I sit at my window here and try to imagine what you are doing. I see you on the edge of your lake: perhaps a bird comes flying across; perhaps it has a message in its mouth, like the twig of a tree.

What do you think that Tree of Life looked like that those people never came across in their Garden of Eden?

A young girl has come to stay with the old lady in the opposite wing of the house. She is the old lady's granddaughter. She comes wandering on to the stone-flagged terrace in front of the house — past the orangery, the antique bowling-alley, a huge ornamental fountain. She has long fair hair. Of course, I have invested her with the lineaments of a fairy story! She is like someone in exile from a future country. So can I tell you this? Do you remember the idea that there is no mathematical reason why messages should not exist from the future as well as from the past; it is our structuring in accordance with time that would prevent us from recognising these. This girl also reminds me of myself that summer, years ago, when I was at home and had nothing to do; my school had burned down; I used to go out on my bicycle to look for lost landscapes, lost gardens. I found a lake and a ruined boathouse. This was the summer when I tried to make a perfect setting for my salamanders. This was not to show the possibility of the inheritance of acquired characteristics — God forbid! — but to see whether from a setting that was aesthetic something new and beautiful might grow — something like a visitor from the future, do you think? This was the sort of experiment, I imagined, that had been performed successfully by Kammerer. So I collected my ferns and crystals, my rare alpine plants, my white sand and coloured stones. And in the event I achieved — but how did I know what I had achieved? — I glimpsed, yes, that something beautiful had grown; but I hardly stayed to check; I had to go back to school; or did I not really want to check? Was not what I had wanted to achieve just such a glimpse of

something beautiful? And if I had stayed to check might it not have gone; was it not safer in my mind, whatever it was — something secret, even sacred. Or perhaps, after all, I had just imagined it! Who wants the responsibility, after all, to have brought to birth something new, something beautiful: what a lifetime would be needed to look after it! How much easier to have done what was expected: to have gone back to school. Certainly no one else seemed to want to know, let alone to nurture them — my hopeful monsters!

Perhaps they and their offspring lived: perhaps they all went into the dustbin.

Now, I would wish to have the chance to look after something like them.

But what would this mean?

In those days I had at least loved enough to have brought an offspring into existence: though in reality, of course, the birth could have had quite natural genetic causes. But still, what a miracle!

Here our equipment has not yet arrived. So I have time to sit at my window and let my thoughts go on journeys.

Donald is playing croquet with some of the men from Cambridge on the lawn.

I am thinking -

If it is radioactivity that at random causes a mutation — and this has become part of the definition both of a mutation and of what is called 'random' -

— And if it is consciousness that brings into existence a particular activity out of potentialities that I suppose could be called 'random' -

— Then why should not a state of consciousness be the environment that might favour a mutation?

This lives: that dies — I loved my salamanders.

And I can write this stuff to you, my angel, because for reasons of what is called 'security' it may never be posted. Testing. Testing. I shall go for a walk in this aesthetic landscape.

September ist 1939 There is a track that goes down from the house through the park and over a hill and then on and on through this strange landscape until it reaches a cluster of houses, a miniature village, all uninhabited: this is where people who worked on the estate must once have

lived; they were moved out, I suppose, in preparation for the area becoming a playground for soldiers; or perhaps they had left earlier, such has been the state of farming recently in England. I had not walked as far as this before. I found the place faintly alarming. The impression from ruined houses is of the impermanence of humans; of the way in which humans play with fire, burn themselves, blow themselves up; of the way in which humans will one day be no more.

I also had the impression that I had been in this place before, or perhaps that I would come here again: there is a theory that this is to do with some split in the memory system of the brain. But what sparks this off in the outside world? We understand very little about memory systems; and indeed what do we understand of the outside world except what comes in through the brain. And there are those areas of the brain for which we seem to have no present use: well, might they not be waiting for some understanding of- what does it mean, the question 'Have I not been here before?' the pattern 'Might I not come here again?'

There was a path going down from this derelict village into a small dell with trees. The path was overgrown with nettles but a way had been made recently by someone trampling through. Now it is true that on a previous occasion I had noticed from my window in the house the girl with fair hair walking this way over the hill: it had seemed that she might be on her way to some rendezvous — with a lover? But was she not too young? Or she might simply have wanted, as I had done years ago in the ruined boathouse, to be alone. But then — had there not also been those intimations of death, of self-destruction, in the ruined boathouse! And had not this girl seemed to be as I had felt myself to be then, an exile in a foreign country? And was not this deserted village now heavy with an air of the impermanence of humans; of death.

The path through the nettles led down into the dell. I went down this path and into an area of trees; in the middle of this there was a clearing. In the clearing there was a very small and low thatched cottage: it was, yes, like something in a fairy story. Across the roof of the cottage had fallen a large branch of a tree; the cottage was like an animal in a trap with its back broken. The path through nettles went from the edge of the clearing to the door of the cottage. The door was half open and half off its hinges. It seemed that there might be someone inside. I stood underneath a tree at the edge of